“Did he know you were pregnant?”

She shook her head. “Not at first. But a month or so after we left, he came to see the kids, and I couldn’t hide it anymore.”

“And the baby was Dustin’s?”

Courtney dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief. “Things between Troy and I had been tense for a while. I had only been with Dustin. The baby was his.”

“Did Dustin know?”

“Yes,” she said with a small smile. “He was so excited to have a child of his own.”

“What happened?”

“I... I miscarried at six months, which was utterly devastating.”

Sam ached at the thought of going so far in a pregnancy only to end up empty-handed at the end. Except that’s not what happened to Courtney.

“Dustin was beside himself. He came unglued. I’d never seen him like that.”

“Like what?”

“Out of his mind with grief and rage at the hand he’d been dealt. He was in love with me and with Troy, and because he was acting so unstable, Troy wanted him out of our lives, going so far as to try to have him fired from the Bureau. It was a nightmare.” She dropped her head into her hands. “We were wrong to ever think an arrangement like what we had with him could work long-term, but we’d never had any reason to believe he was mentally unstable until he turned up at my mother’s house with a baby he said he’d adopted to replace the one we’d lost.”

“Holy...” Sam realized she’d said the word out loud.

“He told me the baby had been born to their receptionist in Knoxville, and when she couldn’t afford to keep it, he’d offered to take the baby.” She wiped her eyes and dabbed at her nose. “He said it would be like our baby had never died.”

“Did you tell Troy?”

“I did, and he realized right away that the baby had been taken from a family in Tennessee.”

“And he told you that?”

Nodding, she said, “We were horrified. We had no idea that Dustin was capable of such a thing, but losing the baby had done something to him. He’d snapped. He told us he’d ruin us if we ever said a word about where that baby came from. He would tell the world how we’d lived, and Troy’s career would be ruined, our family would be homeless when Troy went to jail for kidnapping. Dustin had been clever. He’d set up the whole thing to look like Troy had done it. He said we were going to continue on like nothing had happened, or he’d ruin us both and our children would end up in foster homes.”